The story of the Ford GT, like all good sports stories, is personal. The story of a bitter rivalry that goes back over 50 years to an attempt by Henry Ford II to purchase competing car maker Ferrari. In 1963, at the final stage of the acquisition process, Enzo Ferrari grew cold feet at the imminent loss of control over his motorsports division and withdrew from negotiations. Infuriated, Ford instructed his engineers to teach the Italian automotive entrepreneur a lesson. And in 1966 they did, breaking Ferrari's six-year dominance of world famous endurance race 24 Hours of Le Mans with a spectacular one-two-three finish for the new GT40 – making Ford the first, and only, American manufacturer to emerge victorious from the French track. So began an unbroken four-year run of Le Mans victories for Ford, along with the motorsports tradition of spraying champagne from the podium as driver Jo Siffert accidentally fired his celebratory magnum into the crowd. In 1969 Belgian driver, Jacky Ickx claimed the company's final victory, despite beginning with a slow stroll to his GT40 in a pointed protest over safety concerns with the traditional run and jump start.

The legacy of those extraordinary four years must have loomed large as designers and engineers from Ford's Special Vehicles Team (now Ford Performance) gathered 43 years later in a bunker beneath the company's Michigan HQ to plot Ford's return to the racing circuit. "The GT40 was definitely at the top of my mind. How could it not be?” says director of Ford Performance Dave Pericak.

“What the GT40 stood for, the legacy behind it and the cult-like following it has definitely keeps you focused on what you need to deliver.”

And they didn't just have a race car to build: Le Mans regulations mean that to enter the GTE Pro class, Ford would first have to build a road-worthy production car, then adapt it to endure 24 hours of nonstop racing – all in time to attempt to replicate their first Le Mans victory on its 50th anniversary in June 2016. Fortunately, car design has gotten a lot quicker since the Sixties. Years of painstaking drawing, model making and physical prototype construction have been replaced with a virtual-reality room that allows engineers to explore a 3-D car design, inside and out, before anything is even built, while a driving simulator lets designers feel what the car will be like to use. At the testing stage, computational fluid dynamics has turned the art of aerodynamic design into a precise, predictable science, allowing the operation of features like the GT's flying buttresses and active rear spoiler to be optimised before even hitting the wind tunnel. So, when the first 2016 GT rolled off the production line, Ford already had a pretty good idea of how it would perform.

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All of which was particularly useful given that, despite a passing resemblance to the early GT40, the 2016 GT is like no car Ford has ever built before. Liberal use of carbon fibre in everything from the structural monocoque to the wheels, hand-built around aluminium subframes, means the unmodified supercar weighs in at just 2,890lb. This, combined with a turbocharged 3.5L V6 EcoBoost engine, pumping out around 630bhp – almost 200bhp more than the old GT40 on two fewer cylinders – places the production GT in the highest power-to-weight ratio of any road car ever built, even before the race engineers get their hands on it.

Still, the question remained: when the 2016 Le Mans rolled around, would all this be enough? “We were confident that we had addressed all of the durability concerns, we had speed, we knew what our car could do,” says Pericak. “But we hadn't raced against the rest of the competition much, so we didn't know exactly what they had in their back pockets. A lot can happen in a 24-hour race.”

Despite a rocky start to the season with the GT's Daytona debut, there were positive signs with a first-place finish at the International Motor Sports Association's Laguna Seca course on 1 May, followed by second-place position at the World Endurance Championship's Six Hours of Spa a week later. Then at 3pm on Saturday 18 June all four Ford GTs joined together at the start line in Le Mans. Twenty-four hours later, Sébastien Bourdais, Dirk Müller and Joey Hand of the No68 GT climbed to first place on the GTE Pro class podium – in second place, the No82 Ferrari. "I don't know too many people who can go back to Le Mans and bring back a trophy on their first try,” says Pericak. “The challenge this team faced is not dissimilar from the challenge they faced back in the day.” One year down, three more to go.